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Re: Yuletide

[(Anonymous)]

I'm planning on requesting Shirley/Caroline for Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, so that's something to get on! Brontë writes in unexpected and bitterly funny third-person point of view about industrial unrest and gender and class relations in Yorkshire during the Napoleonic Wars. Weird, fascinating, often infuriating book, full of atmosphere and memorable characters, and a strong and heavily romantic friendship between two young women. ...also het that I don't care for. So.

Re: Yuletide

[(Anonymous)]

I doubt very much that I can write Shirley/Caroline, but I'll be very excited to read it!

Re: Yuletide

[(Anonymous)]

:D

"All of this makes so much more sense if Shirley is in love with Caroline!" said Nonny, approximately eighty billion times while reading that book. Every time. Ugh.

I totally understand and would be petrified myself of writing fic for a Brontë novel. You can help me brainstorm prompts! So far I've got:

(a) Shirley returns to Fieldhead as Shirley Keeldar, Esq. in truth and starts courting Caroline.
(b) Rich and Eccentric Miss Keeldar goes traveling with Caroline as her lady's companion, more or less tropey get-togethers ensue.
(c) A point of view shift! I don't expect too many people to jump on it, but I'd love to see some of that trademark Brontë intense first-person POV applied to this book.
(d) Magic – there's already so much magic just hanging out at the edges of the book, I'd love to see it kicked up a notch to Shirley and Caroline outright having adventures in Faerie, meeting actual mermaids, etc.

...and that's where I'm at. Thoughts?

Re: Yuletide

[(Anonymous)]

NONNIE, YOU ARE SPEAKING MY LANGUAGE. (The marriages Charlotte dreams up for those two....WTF, girl.) I love how twisted and sardonic a lot of Shirley is. It's fascinatingly flawed.

Re: Yuletide

[(Anonymous)]

:D :D :D

I knew nothing about that book going in and I was so mad about Louis Moore in particular. I don't know when I've been quite that level of grudgy about a canon love interest, and I have borne some grudges.

It's such a weird and uncomfortable book, I do love it, flaws and all.

Re: Yuletide

[(Anonymous)]

Louis Moore just pops up out of nowhere and I was like, NO, WHO ARE YOU? GO AWAY. Caroline/Shirley is already super slashy in the book! and then all of a sudden, they're all getting married and all happy. Except that description of Shirley on her wedding day is chilling. Isn't she described as a panther gnawing at the chain?

Re: Yuletide

[(Anonymous)]

Now I want to read Shirley! I love CB (Villette's extremely my shit, including Lucy/Ginevra) but I've only seen people saying "nah, don't bother with Shirley." I thought it was probably boring, but that sounds kinda intriguing.

Re: Yuletide

[(Anonymous)]

Boring! Goodness. I could pick many words to describe it, not all of them positive, and certainly it goes to pieces a little towards the end and isn't as deeply lovable as Villette, but boring. Yeesh. (Lucy/Ginevra is my jam, obvs, though the Yuletide gods have already graced us on that front, so I'm slightly less desperate for fic.) Though I suppose Brontë might not totally disagree, as far as that goes. Have a paragraph from the opening, if that'll tempt you:

If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto. It is not positively affirmed that you shall not have a taste of the exciting, perhaps towards the middle and close of the meal, but it is resolved that the first dish set upon the table shall be one that a Catholic—ay, even an Anglo-Catholic—might eat on Good Friday in Passion Week: it shall be cold lentils and vinegar without oil; it shall be unleavened bread with bitter herbs, and no roast lamb.

It does take a while to get doing, and the title character doesn't show up for several chapters, and she's not even the sole main character. It's a little diffuse, though nowhere near as diffuse as, say, Middlemarch, if you've read that. (...and, sidebar, if I thought I could reread that in time I might cast my net and see if anyone would write me the terrible horrible no good at all Dorothea/Rosamond I've always wanted. Ah, next year.)

Re: Yuletide

[(Anonymous)]

I might cast my net and see if anyone would write me the terrible horrible no good at all Dorothea/Rosamond I've always wanted

Other nonnie in this thread is LISTENING, oh yes. I've always liked their dynamic, especially that scene where Rosamond is all You know he loves you! but they see each other as separate individual beings and it's just beautiful.

Re: Yuletide

[(Anonymous)]

I can never read that opening as anything but a giant bitchslap at all the (male) critics who called Jane Eyre romantic, naive, fanciful, exaggerated, blah blah blah. And there was an almost perverse streak in Charlotte, so she's like, Hah, you want something non-Romantic and full of social criticism and politics? FINE, here you go. For her to write such a different book, especially after Jane Eyre was such a huge smash, took a lot of guts. She's writing THIS IS NOT JANE EYRE II in big letters right at the start.

What's fascinating to me is in Villette she really did it -- there's almost no plot, but it's as heightened as Jane Eyre, and Lucy's interior psychological landscape is really wild and vivid.

Re: Yuletide

[(Anonymous)]

NA’s spidey-senses tingled at the mention of Dorothea/Rosamond. I do not think I could attempt Middlemarch fic, but I would love to talk about it! What does the fic you’ve always wanted look like?

Re: Yuletide

[(Anonymous)]

Something where instead of accepting Ladislaw Dorothea decides it's her new mission in life to better Rosamond and help her reach spiritual fulfillment and Rosamond takes it as her due that of course Dorothea should devote herself to Rosamond's happiness and comfort, and they get closer and closer steadily misumderstanding each others' aims all the way, both subtly trying to use the other to fulfill needs the other doesn't understand and getting more and more codependant... I don't see it as being especially good for them, but it'd be fascinating!

I tried to write it myself once, but while the style is fun to pastiche the characterization is headache-inducing to get my head around.

Re: Yuletide

[(Anonymous)]

Well "boring" is slightly dependent on cultural context -- the opening chapter that so many people sigh through now, about the shower of curates, was really controversial in her time, because what writer (WOMAN writer) would describe good men of the cloth as behaving like that? except it was all pretty much from her experience as the preacher's daughter, and she claimed she'd even toned it down. Her (male) publishers wanted it cut from the book entirely, and she refused. The book really shows off Charlotte's satirical, even sardonic, side. It's also kind of very much about her father (she used his experiences in it), and even the curate of his she would go on to marry, Arthur Bell Nichols. She thought he probably wouldn't like it, but when he first read it he cracked up at all the curate scenes and insisted on reading them aloud.